Real-time Malaria Parasite Screening in Thick Blood Smears for Low-Resource Setting

2020-06-01
Chibuta, Samson
Acar, Aybar Can
Malaria is a serious public health problem in many parts of the world. Early diagnosis and prompt effective treatment are required to avoid anemia, organ failure, and malaria-associated deaths. Microscopic analysis of blood samples is the preferred method for diagnosis. However, manual microscopic examination is very laborious and requires skilled health personnel of which there is a critical shortage in the developing world such as in sub-Saharan Africa. Critical shortages of trained health personnel and the inability to cope with the workload to examine malaria slides are among the main limitations of malaria microscopy especially in low-resource and high disease burden areas. We present a low-cost alternative and complementary solution for rapid malaria screening for low resource settings to potentially reduce the dependence on manual microscopic examination. We develop an image processing pipeline using a modified YOLOv3 detection algorithm to run in real time on low-cost devices. We test the performance of our solution on two datasets. In the dataset collected using a microscope camera, our model achieved 99.07% accuracy and 97.46% accuracy on the dataset collected using a mobile phone camera. While the mean average precision of our model is on par with human experts at an object level, we are several orders of magnitude faster than human experts as we can detect parasites in images as well as videos in real time.
JOURNAL OF DIGITAL IMAGING

Suggestions

Effect of stereotactic radiosurgery on lipids and proteins of normal and hypoperfused rat brain homogenates: A Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy study
Toyran, N; Zorlu, F; Severcan, Feride (Informa UK Limited, 2005-12-01)
Purpose: The effect of stereotactic radiosurgery on lipids and proteins of normal and hypoperfused rat brain was investigated to see if hypoxic areas are really more resistant to radiation effects or not.
Most Common Foodborne Pathogens and Mycotoxins on Fresh Produce: A Review of Recent Outbreaks
Yeni, Filiz; Yavaş, Sinem; Alpas, Hami; Soyer, Yeşim (Informa UK Limited, 2016-01-01)
Every year millions of people are affected and thousands of them die due to infections and intoxication as a result of foodborne outbreaks, which also cause billions of dollars' worth of damage, public health problems, and agricultural product loss. A considerable portion of these outbreaks is related to fresh produce and caused by foodborne pathogens on fresh produce and mycotoxins. Escherichia coli O104:H4 outbreak, occurred in Germany in 2011, has attracted a great attention on foodborne outbreaks caused...
Virbiohub: a central resource for virus bioinformatics research
Küçükyılmaz, Cansel Hatice; Aksoy , Selahattin; Ibrahim , Ahmed Hassan; Karabulut, Onur Can; Karpuzcu, Betül Asiye; Türk , Erdem; Süzek, Barış Ethem (Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Enformatik Enstitüsü; 2022-10)
Viruses are a major cause of infectious diseases, and they lead to a substantial burden on public health and the global economy. Recently emerged outbreaks such as COVID-19 and monkeypox further emphasize the need for bioinfor- matics resources supporting research on viral diseases. Es- timation of infection capacity for viruses, identifying host shifts, and more importantly predicting virus-host protein- protein interactions (PPIs) that are a prerequisite to viral infections are main topics of interest in ...
An analysis of the prevalence of malaria in Turkey over the last 85 years
Piyal, Birgul; Akdur, Recep; Ocaktan, Esin; Yozgatlıgil, Ceylan (Informa UK Limited, 2013-01-01)
Background: Affecting 106 countries, malaria is a major global burden. Though intensive antimalaria efforts in Turkey have been successful in bringing down the number of cases, historically malaria was a serious public health concern.
Modelling weather index based drought insurance for provinces in the Central Anatolia Region
Evkaya, Ö. Ozan; Yıldırak, Ş. Kasırga; Department of Actuarial Sciences (2012)
Drought, which is an important result of the climate change, is one of the most serious natural hazards globally. It has been agreed all over the world that it has adverse impacts on the production of agriculture, which plays a major role in the economy of a country. Studies showed that the results of the drought directly affected the crop yields, and it seems that this negative impact will continue drastically soon. Moreover, many researches revealed that, Turkey will be affected from the results of climat...
Citation Formats
S. Chibuta and A. C. Acar, “Real-time Malaria Parasite Screening in Thick Blood Smears for Low-Resource Setting,” JOURNAL OF DIGITAL IMAGING, pp. 763–775, 2020, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63232.